After last week’s post, I realized I had more I wanted to say.

There is another situation related to this that I frequently see. Let’s go back to that aforementioned “group of persons working on addressing the strategic problems faced by an organization.” So when you are facing a tactical decision, such as the “wires vs software” situation, this can resolve down to some mutually exclusive solution set. But many strategic issues are not so simple.

Let’s look at an example. A strategic issue might be, “our engineers are struggling to use technology X, and this is impacting our production velocity.” I can easily imagine, in a strategic leaders meeting, differing opinions on how to address this.

• “We need to hire people who know X.” (Root cause: We are hiring the wrong people.)
• “We need to send people to training on X.” (Root cause: We are not investing in our current people.)
• “We need to refactor our product line to not use X.” (Root cause: We are using the wrong tech stack.)

Now, this is a simplistic example so you can easily see my obvious point, which is, more than one of these root causes might actually co-exist, and thus more than one of these ideas could address the issue, and in fact you should probably do more than one to most effectively address the situation. But my point is, I frequently see this same scenario play out with strategic issues that maybe its not so obvious. So the meeting ends up in a place where different leaders are all asserting that their ideas of the root cause is the one-and-only, and thus their suggestion of what to do should be the sole focus of solving the strategic issue.

This is a place where inclusion and diversity can be super helpful to you, as a leader. Because by having differing viewpoints, and being humble and earnestly listening to them, you can understand the broader scope of actual root causes, and thus more effectively solve those problems for your organization.